Posts Tagged ‘porkulus’

Under Barry Husseins’ pathetic failure of leadership, 24% of Americans believe that the recession will last 2 years. And another 51% believe that it will last MORE than two years. Given the fact that Obama will only be president for another two years, and given the fact that Obama was elected to fix the economy, what we basically have is a statement from 75% of Americans that Obama will be a completely failed president.

Here’s another one, and allow me to quote from below:

Only 13 percent of Americans say Mr. Obama’s economic programs, among them the stimulus package, have helped them personally. Twenty-three percent say they have hurt, while 63 percent say they have had no effect.

Now, understand: the stimulus is officially $862 billion, but it’s actual cost according to the Congressional Budget Office will be $3.27 TRILLION. And 87% of the American people say that this beyond supermassive sum of money which will burden our children for decades either had no effect at all or actually HURT them.

Now, this $3.27 trillion will surely ultimately be ripped out of the hide of the US economy. It’s only a matter of time. An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs. And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation. Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate. Why? Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued. There’s simply no way it can’t be. If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire. The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems. If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency. And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins. Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

That said, there is solid evidence that the stimulus actually HURT THE ECONOMY AND EMPLOYMENT IN THE RIGHT-HERE-AND-NOW by sucking money out of the private sector where it would have been put to good use and instead funneling it through the government were it was pissed away on political boondoggles and bureaucratic inefficiencies. The evidence is clear: the governments that did not pass huge stimulus packages have fared much better than those like the US which did.

A further fact in our economic and political collapse is that Obama is creating a permanent elite class of government bureaucrats. USA Today found that “At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn.” Obama has massively expanded government, even as the the real pie for everyone (the economy) has been shrinking. Since government workers don’t actually create wealth, but merely live off the taxes paid by those who create wealth, and since there are more and more government workers and fewer and fewer private sector workers, we’re heading for a real problem. Again, “paradoxically” is a good word, as paradoxically Obama is creating a ruling class over the people who consume the peoples’ wealth in the name of helping the people.

And all of the above contributes to why Gerald Celente says America is about to experience what he calls “the Greatest Depression.”

A majority of Americans have a negative impression of the economy and expect the effects of the recession to linger for years, according to a new CBS News poll.

Most also say President Obama has spent too little time on the economy, which Americans cite as the country’s most important problem by a wide margin.

Three in four Americans now say the effects of the recession will last another two years or more. More than eight in 10 say the condition of the economy is bad, up five points from last month.

Just 25 percent of Americans say the economy is getting better – down from 41 percent in April. About half say it is staying the same, and the remaining quarter say it is getting worse.

More than half of Americans – 52 percent – say Mr. Obama has spent too little time dealing with the economy.

And with unemployment near 10 percent, the economy is their priority: Thirty-eight percent volunteer it as the country’s most important problem. That far outpaces the percentage that cited the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan (seven percent), health care (six percent), the deficit (five percent), and the oil spill in the Gulf (five percent).

The county’s most important economic problem, Americans say, is jobs, volunteered by 38 percent of respondents. Coming in a distant second was the national debt, the deficit and spending, cited by 10 percent in the poll, which was conducted between July 9th and 12th.

Just 27 percent of Americans say their local job market is good. Seventy-one percent call it bad. Nearly one in four expect their household finances to get worse over the next year, twice the percentage that expects their finances to improve.

Only 13 percent of Americans say Mr. Obama’s economic programs, among them the stimulus package, have helped them personally. Twenty-three percent say they have hurt, while 63 percent say they have had no effect.

Twenty-three percent say the stimulus package made the economy better – down from 32 percent in April and 36 percent last September. Eighteen percent say the stimulus package damaged the economy, while 56 percent say it had no effect.

The president’s job approval rating on the economy now stands at 40 percent – a drop of five points from last month. Fifty-four percent disapprove of his handling of the issue.

In general, Americans see Mr. Obama as spending too little time on the economy and the oil spill in the Gulf, and too much time on health care: Thirty-nine percent say he has spent too much time on the issue, while 24 percent say he spent too little time.

Americans do believe the president takes decisive action, with two and three suggesting he does. But more than half (53 percent) say he is not tough enough in his approach.

Americans are evenly split, meanwhile, on whether the president shares their priorities. Two in three believe he cares at least to some degree about people like them.

The president’s overall approval rating now stands at 44 percent, matching his disapproval rating. It stood at 47 percent last month.

The Issues: Economic Priorities

Most Americans – 53 percent – say the best way to get the economy moving is to cut taxes. Thirty-seven percent instead choose government spending on job creation.

Americans are split about how the federal government should spend its money: Forty-six percent say the priority should be spending to create jobs, and 47 percent want to put the focus on deficit reduction.

More than half want Congress to extend unemployment benefits now, a Democratic priority that has been blocked by Congressional Republicans.

Americans are roughly evenly split on whether BP will stop the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the summer. Most (58 percent) are not confident that the company will fairly compensate those affected by the spill.

Wall Street Reform:

With Democrats poised to pass sweeping reforms of Wall Street this week, a majority (57 percent) say bank regulations should be increased.

Most Americans favor a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Fifty-four percent back a timetable, while 41 percent oppose one. Mr. Obama has said the United States will start removing troops from the country in July of next year, but only if conditions on the ground permit.

Elena Kagan:

Most Americans can’t say whether Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan should be confirmed. Among those who have an opinion, 21 percent say yes and 19 percent say no. Less than half say they are closely following news about her nomination.

The Long Run:

Despite their concerns about the economy, Americans do not believe their country is on the decline. Fifty-nine percent expect things to get better in the long run, while 36 percent say America’s best days have passed.

This poll was conducted among a random sample of 966 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone July 9-12, 2010. Phone numbers were dialed from random digit dial samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher.

This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.

President Barack Obama, in the heart of the U.S. auto industry, told a crowd of workers that the government bailouts of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC are giving taxpayers a return on their investment.

Heading into a congressional election season in which polls show the public skeptical about the $84.8 billion rescue and anxious about economy, Obama is using the backdrop of Detroit- area plants owned by GM and Chrysler to promote what he says is an industry revival that has saved more than a million jobs.

“The fact that we’re standing in this magnificent factory today is a testament to the decisions we made,” Obama said at a Chrysler factory that recently added a second shift of workers to build the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Obama told about 1,000 employees at the factory that, if his opponents had been successful in blocking aid for automakers, their jobs might not exist. Their efforts are “proving the naysayers wrong,” he said.

“They said we should just walk away and let those jobs go,” Obama said. “Today, this industry is growing stronger. It’s creating new jobs.”

Voter Skepticism

Voters aren’t persuaded. A Bloomberg National Poll conducted July 9-12 that shows the federal assistance package to automobile companies is becoming less popular: 48 percent say they became less supportive in recent months versus 17 percent who say they have become more supportive.

Steve Rattner, the former head of the president’s automotive task force, said that perception is disappointing.

“It appears that those of us behind it haven’t succeeded in convincing people that it’s worked,” he said in an interview.

Since GM and Chrysler exited bankruptcy a little more than a year ago, the industry — including Ford Motor Co., which didn’t seek federal aid — has re-hired 55,000 workers after shedding 334,000 in the year before.

So $84.8 billion spent, and 55,000 jobs rehired back.

Oh, and the 55,000 jobs that came back counts rehires for Ford, the company that didn’t take any of Obama’s bailouts. Or Bush’s, for that matter.

One million, five hundred and forty-one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen dollars per job. And Obama is pitching it as some kind of grand achievement worthy of a messiah.

Unions are happy. Of course, our children are ultimately going to be chained to giant millstones and forced to pull them in a circle for the rest of their lives. As will everyone else, including senior citizens – at least until they get “permanently retired” by a death panel. But unions are happy. And if you’re not happy, well, screw you, you racist.

Every single Clown Car GM sells is going to lose money. But that’s okay. Because Barry Hussein – courtesy of the American taxpayer – will subsidize every Clown Car that is sold at a loss.

As for Obama’s claim that he’s “saved” a million jobs, that’s the kind of reasoning that only someone idiotic enough to buy a $41,000 clown car to show how superior they are would buy. How about this: Bush saved fifty million jobs. If you don’t think he did, you prove he didn’t. In fact, Bush saved the world. Because aliens with superior technology would have invaded earth had Bush not been commander-in-chief. Prove they wouldn’t have.

“One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved,'” said Carnegie Mellon University professor Allan Mentzler. “It doesn’t exist for good reason: How can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” Which is to say, a purely rhetorical argument that no American president has ever in history had the naked chutzpah to use amounts to the heart of Obama’s economic policy.

Had George Bush used that asinine argument to justify his economic leadership and vision, he would have been laughed right out of the White House by the media. But Barack Obama is using the asinine argument, so it obviously must be true.

We are about to see why the Soviet Union failed. The government spent all kinds of money producing crap cars to keep the party proletariat employed. But they were crap cars. And nobody bought them. The same thing applies to Obama’s GM bailout and the Chevy Klown Kar. And the same with all the boondoggles Obama built with our trillion dollars (actually with what will become our $3.27 trillion, but who’s really counting any more?).

Obama’s boast about the auto industry jobs is a microchosm of the overall stupidity of Obama’s “stimulus.” We have spent over $534 BILLION (that’s the 62% of the $862 billion stimulus that has been spent so far) in order to create some 599,108 jobs.

Do the math.

That boils down to an average of $892,220 PER JOB.

I mean, that ridiculous figure is less than the even more ridiculous figure of more than $1.5 million for each union auto job. But then again, some of those nearly 600,000 jobs probably weren’t union, which accounts for the relatively trivial figure of $892,000.

Obama is cheering all this, but the term “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind. These victories are going to implode America into a ruin unlike anything that even historians have ever heard of.

In a clear sign of construction’s persistently severe problems, the industry’s jobless rate hit its highest level in at least a decade, climbing to 22.7% in December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported.

The latest BLS monthly employment figures, released Jan. 8, show that construction’s December jobless rate rose from November’s 19.4%, and also was well above the December 2008 mark of 15.3%.

“In at least a decade”? That would be during – your audible gasp here – the Clinton years, when the streets were paved with gold (but clearly not laid by construction workers).

Hot Air shows us what a bunch of hot air Obama’s and the Democrat’s promises really were:

Democrats insisted that they would usher in a wave of new jobs by speeding up spending on infrastucture, especially road construction. All across the US, signs began appearing that heralded the local traffic snarl as a product of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — Porkulus, as we came to call it. Did it do anything to create or even “save” jobs? The Associated Press says no:

Even within the construction industry, which stood to benefit most from transportation money, the AP’s analysis found there was nearly no connection between stimulus money and the number of construction workers hired or fired since Congress passed the recovery program. The effect was so small, one economist compared it to trying to move the Empire State Building by pushing against it.

Which is to say, Obama is depending on “the butterfly effect” for his stimulus package to actually work.

I should confess here that I have actually captured a butterfly, and have evilly created chaos all over the planet by forcing it to flap its wings. But apparently no U.S. jobs have come out of it.

I also have to mock the part about the porkulus road signs (actually the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” – but “porkulus” has turned out to be FAR more accurate). We find that the Democrats are spending millions of dollars for “stimulus” road signs that aren’t stimulating anything but the Democrats’ political slush fund to bribe votes for their ObamaCare boondoggle.

Michelle Malkin presented what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signs SHOULD HAVE looked like nearly 8 months ago:

“I mean you cannot take $50 trillion or $50 billion, any amount of money out of the private sector then put it back in and say you’re stimulating something. You’d have to infuse money that’s not already there. And there’s no money to do that. You have to print it, you have to borrow it, or you have to tax it and then put it back. This is an old shell game; it’s an old trick. It’s designed to enhance the growth of government. But the proof is right there in the latest unemployment numbers — and I don’t mean the 10% employment, which is an obvious disaster, and I don’t mean the 17% real unemployment. That’s an obvious disaster. But here are two numbers from last Friday’s jobless numbers: Construction unemployment is 22.7%. It’s 22.7%! Now, remember, the stimulus was for “shovel-ready jobs;” Roads, bridges, schools, all this infrastructure stuff. Construction unemployment is almost 23%. Government worker unemployment is at 3%, 3.6, less than 4%.”

The Associated Press has the following story (from which the quote from Hot Air above is a part):

Stimulus for roads no path to help joblessnessAnalysis comes as Obama urges another bill funding more transit projects

updated 9:01 a.m. ET Jan. 11, 2010

WASHINGTON – Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an AP analysis has found.

Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn’t matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama’s argument that more road money would address an “urgent need to accelerate job growth.”

Obama wants a second stimulus bill from Congress that relies in part on more road and bridge spending, projects the president said are “at the heart of our effort to accelerate job growth.”

And Rush Limbaugh picks up from there:

“The AP is admitting here it didn’t work but then, hey, they say let’s try it again. They outline in this piece that the stimulus money that’s been spent so far has had no effect on jobs, none. Not anywhere. The veil is off. They’re no longer pretending that there are jobs created or saved. Now, here how the story starts: “Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in –” and it’s not Bush’s. It’s Obama’s. “– spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an AP analysis has found. Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn’t matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama’s argument that more road money would address an ‘urgent need to accelerate job growth.'”

All they can talk about from the stimulus that’s been beneficial is the extension of unemployment compensation benefits. So, you know, the real question there, folks, is how come despite the vast amount of history that’s available to all of us, all of the smart, so-called smart educated business and economic people, hard evidence, examples of failure and successes, charts and graphs, data out the wazoo, we still seem to be confounded by the elementary process of creating and keeping jobs. Why is this? Why is the blueprint for coming out of the circumstance we’re in, the 1980s, JFK in the 1960s, why is it ignored? And why is this, government spending, constantly looked at as a panacea when it isn’t? And the answer is it’s not looked at as a panacea. The people in charge of doing this know exactly what they’re doing. They’re weakening the private sector for a host of reasons that we’ve mentioned. I’m going to get blue in the face here, repetitive. Just don’t doubt me. It’s being done on purpose and the reasons are all recounted in various multiple monologues at my website, RushLimbaugh.com.”

Meanwhile, the government sector is absolutely thriving compared to the rest of the economy.

Would you have supported the stimulus if you’d known the TRUTH: that instead of “shovel-ready jobs” we’d be getting “bureaucrat-ready jobs”?

First of all, did Obama’s stimulus create jobs and help the economy? I put it this way the other day, while writing an article about how ObamaCare amounts to a profoundly dishonest and secretive scheme to hijack one-sixth of the economy:

The answer is readily obvious. No, the stimulus didn’t help the economy. As a solid plurality of Americans now rightly believe, the stimulus HURT the economy.

And they are right. What we find out when we look at the economies of countries that either had or did not have stimulus packages is that the countries with huge stimulus packages (like the U.S.) had much more unemployment than the countries that didn’t:

As President Obama and other Democrats have correctly pointed out many times, this has been a worldwide recession. But if Summers and Biden are right in their assessment of the stimulus measures, one would think that the U.S. economy should be recovering better the many other countries, countries not wise enough to follow Obama’s lead of an extraordinary $787 billion increase in government spending. It is also particularly timely to evaluate the spending since Christina Romer, the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Congress today that the stimulus had already had most of its impact on the economy. […]

But it is not just Canada where the unemployed are faring better. Other countries, too, decided against a massive stimulus plan. In March, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel nodding in agreement at his side, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared: “the problem is not about spending more.” Later that month, the president of the European Union, Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic, castigated the Obama administration’s deficit spending and bank bailouts as “a road to hell.”The Washington Postwrote that there was a “fundamental divide that persists between the United States and many European countries over the best way to respond to the global financial crisis.”

The unemployment rate in the European Union was higher than in the United States to begin with even before the Obama administration’s spending. By January, the EU unemployment rate stood at 8.5 percent — almost a whole percentage point higher than ours. So what has happened since the big U.S. stimulus spending spree was passed? We more than caught up with the EU’s high unemployment rate. By August, the last month data is available for the EU, the U.S.’s unemployment rate slightly exceeded the EU’s — 9.7 versus 9.6 percent.

Germany has particularly been out front resisting the call for more public spending. Yet, from January through September, the German unemployment rate only rose slightly, from 7.9 to 8.2 percent.

Data on unemployment rates from 27 countries from Japan and South Korea to Brazil and other South American countries to Europe shows that from January to August display the same consistent pattern. Even in the EU it isn’t just a few countries that are driving the relatively small increase they have experienced. The U.S. had a larger increase in unemployment than 22 countries — that is, 81 percent of the countries had a smaller increase in unemployment this year than the United States. Unemployment in some major countries such as Brazil and Russia has actually fallen since January (see Table here). Other countries, from France to Mexico to Australia to Switzerland, have seen unemployment increase by only about half the amount of the U.S. rate. Indeed, the average increase in unemployment for the 27 countries is slightly less than half the US increase.

The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning.

The unemployment rate might be stuck at 10 percent, but the more detailed numbers in the Department of Labor’s Household survey data paint a more dire picture. The number of people with a job fell by 589,000 in December. Even worse, the number of people not in the labor force grew by an astounding 843,000 during just the last month. The Household survey data is what is used to measure the unemployment rate.

To get an idea of the size of this increase in the number of people not in the labor force, since February, when the stimulus package was passed, I repeat, the number of people not in the labor force has grown by 3.2 million. But the number for December represents 26 percent of the entire increase over that period of time. The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning. Of course, they have had good reasons to be discouraged. Similarly since February, the total number of people employed has fallen by 4 million.

In September, Larry Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, claimed: “We have walked a substantial distance back from the economic abyss and are on the path toward economic recovery. Most importantly, we have seen a substantial change in the trend of job loss.” Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, made a similar statement today. While conceding that the December numbers were a “slight setback,” she argued: “In a broad sense the trend toward moderating job loss is continuing, consistent with the gradual labor market stabilization we have been seeing over the last several months.”

The growth in the U.S. unemployment rate has continued to outpace the rest of the world. Since February, the average unemployment rate for the European Union has grown by 1.2 percentage points. By contrast, the US unemployment rate has grown by 1.9 percentage points — a 58 percent greater increase. Nor does the rate look particularly strong compared to what economists were predicting at the beginning of the year. Back in mid-January, business economists and forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected the December unemployment rate to be at 8.6 percent.

Unemployment should start to improve, but the numbers indicate that the improvement in unemployment that economists and forecasters were predicting has occurred much more slowly than was expected at the beginning of 2009. By moving huge amounts of money from one industry to another, the stimulus as well as all the regulatory changes have caused a lot of churning in the labor market — movement of people from one job to another than has caused temporary unemployment. Unfortunately, the huge number of people who have withdrawn from the labor force represent a big hangover that will make reducing unemployment a slow process.

Obama could care less about the millions of workers who have despaired of finding a job to the point where they don’t even bother to look for work any more, because those people fall off out of the measurement categories. If you consider them, unemployment is now at 17.3%.

Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC. […]

“We underestimate how much the whole economy is dependent on the mortgage industry, and that has to change,” Whitney said. “This is what happens when you delay the inevitable. We’re buying time here, but we’re not restructuring the economy.”

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

NEW YORK, Jan 7 (Reuters) – U.S. commercial mortgage-backed bond defaults may more than double this year as the economic recession hurts office building, retail store and multifamily housing assets, Fitch Ratings said on Wednesday.

It was the mortgage industry – imploded by Democrats – that caused the economic implosion of 2008. And our failure-in-chief hasn’t done a damned thing to make that industry better. All he’s given, characteristic of his entire presidency, is false hope.

One day, years from now, an honest Obama administration official (if there is one) will be saying something similar to FDR’s Treasury Secretary:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, six years after FDR rolled out his failed New Deal, unemployment was still at 20.7%.

We are now only 3.4 percentage points away from Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau’s moment of clarity.

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans forced Democrats to vote in favor of cutting billions from providers of home care for older people as partisan debate flared Saturday during a rare weekend session on President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Obama planned to travel to Capitol Hill on Sunday to help Democrats resolve internal disputes that stand in the way of Majority Leader Harry Reid bringing the 10-year, nearly $1 trillion legislation to a vote.

Ahead of his visit, Republicans, bent on making Democrats cast politically risky votes, offered their third amendment in the debate so far showcasing more than $400 billion in cuts to projected Medicare spending that would pay for the bill, mostly for subsidies to help extend coverage to millions of uninsured.

Like the other two, this one went down to defeat, on a vote of 53 to 41. The measure by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., would have eliminated $42 billion in cuts over 10 years to agencies that provide home health care to seniors under Medicare.

Four moderate Democrats joined all Republicans present in voting for the amendment: Sens. Jim Webb of Virginia, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Underscoring the pressures on the moderates, Lincoln, who faces a difficult re-election next year, initially cast a “no” vote with the Democratic majority but switched to “yes” in the course of the 15-minute vote. Republicans accused her of flip-flopping, but Lincoln said later that she changed her vote after considering how important home health care is to Arkansas.

“That’s why they give us 15 minutes,” said Lincoln.

The more consequential action was taking place behind closed doors Saturday as Democrats struggled to find a compromise on a proposed government insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. Lincoln and several other moderate Democrats are opposed to the government insurance plan in the bill, and Reid, D-Nev., doesn’t have a vote to spare in his 60-member caucus.

The Democrats’ logic is to replace a bankrupt government program that will only crash against the seniors it was supposed to cover with a vastly larger government program that will crash with a far larger implosion against everybody.

Seniors are going to die under the Democrats’ plan. The logic is unavoidable: 1) the plan calls for young, healthy people to buy expensive insurance policies – which they have never purchased before – in order to “spread out risks” for the entire system. 2) If they don’t purchase the coverage, they will be called upon to pay a fine. The problem is that the fine is much lower than the price of the insurance coverage. 3) Therefore young people largely WON’T purchase the insurance, and will instead pay the fine, knowing that since they CAN’T be rejected for any “pre-existing condition” (such as not being insured), they can’t be turned down if they get sick/injured and then need coverage. For what it’s worth, a lot of other adults will be encouraged to do the same thing. 4) Therefore, the Democrats’ plan will not raise nearly as much as they think. And 5) the need to severely ration care will be critical.

As Congress’s balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can’t regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

The Dean of the Harvard Medical School gave it a “failing grade.” Dr. Jeffrey Flier argued that:

In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.

The state’s largest doctors group is opposing healthcare legislation being debated in the Senate this week, saying it would increase local healthcare costs and restrict access to care for elderly and low-income patients.

The California Medical Assn. represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, making it the second-largest state medical association in the country after Texas. […]

d“The Senate bill came so short that we could not support it, even though we solidly support healthcare reform,” said Dr. Dev GnanaDev, medical director at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in San Bernardino, who also serves on the association’s executive committee.

Doctors who oppose the Senate bill are concerned that it would would shift Medicare funding from urban to rural areas, move responsibility for Medicare oversight away from Congress by creating an Independent Medicare Commission and, ultimately, decrease Medicare reimbursement rates.

Support for the president’s health care plan fell to 38%, its lowest ever, just before Thanksgiving. Followed by two weeks at 41%, this marks the lowest extended period of support for the plan yet. With the exception of a few days following nationally televised presidential appeals for the legislation, the number of voters opposed to the plan has always exceeded the number who favor it.

“This suggests that public opinion about the health care plan is hardening,” says Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports. “Despite the fact that most American believe our health care system needs major changes, most are opposed to what Congress is currently doing about it.” […]

While one of the chief stated goals of the plan proposed by the president and congressional Democrats is to lower the cost of health care, 57% say costs will go up if the plan is passed. Twenty-one percent (21%) say costs will go down, and 17% believe they will stay about the same.

Similarly, only 23% think the quality of health care will get better if the plan is passed, while 54% predict that it will get worse. Sixteen percent (16%) expect quality to stay about the same.

So what do the Democrats – who promised unprecedented “openness” and “transparency” – do? Barack Obama went to the Senate and had a
“closed-door meeting” that slammed the door shut in Republicans’ faces. This is a hard care ideologically leftist partisan takever, funded by flat-out bribes paid for by the taxpayers.

It would be nice if the Obama administration got its narrative straight. Christine Romer, the chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, says that the stimulus pretty much had all the effect it’s going to have. And while she’s saying that, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is proclaiming that the stimulus was designed with a two-year horizon and that “half that effect is still ahead of us.” Maybe they could get together and cook their story.

It wouldn’t hurt if the White House got its basic facts straight, while they were at it.

WASHINGTON – The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.

Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama’s stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.

“I think you’ll see a pretty good degree of accuracy,” DeSeve said in an interview.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP’s review, telling reporters, “We’re talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error.”

The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.

Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

• Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.

• A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.

• The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.

Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business’ claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months, company president Mariano Tan said.

The short-term positions should have been reported as 635 full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs under the government’s method of calculating stimulus work, Tan said.

Now, first of all, stop and contemplate the farce that is going on here. We have lost 3 million jobs since Obama bluffed and pandered his generational theft act through Congress. And they are touting 30,000 jobs as a success? I mean, 30,000 jobs created or saved is a massive failure on its face. And then it turns out that even many of those 30,000 jobs are bogus.

Obama promised his Wreckovery Act would create 3 million new jobs. The fact that he now has to play games to create the illusion that he “saved” or created a minuscule 30 thousand jobs is a screaming testimony to what a failure Obama has truly been.

The White House, according to media reports, is blasting the Associated Press for exposing this new Obama administration fabrication. I guess they’re not a “legitimate news agency,” either.

Economists forecast the nation’s total output grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent between July and September, after contracting for a record four straight quarters. That growth has been fueled by a huge influx of government cash, including a temporary tax credit for first-time homeowners and a $1.25 trillion Federal Reserve program to keep mortgage rates low.

In other words, the GDP grew, my hind end. Rather, the government spent a ton of money, the result of which was to artificially pump up the economy. It’s the equivalent of borrowing a ton of money you don’t have to buy a car you can’t afford in order to impress your neighbors. Only it’s Obama instead of you, and it’s trillions of dollars rather than thousands.

July 20 (Bloomberg) — U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $23.7 trillion to bolster the economy and bail out financial companies, saidNeil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The Treasury’s $700 billion bank-investment program represents a fraction of all federal support to resuscitate the U.S. financial system, including $6.8 trillion in aid offered by the Federal Reserve, Barofsky said in a report released today.

Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said the U.S. has spent less than $2 trillion so far and that Barofsky’s estimates are flawed because they don’t take into account assets that back those programs or fees charged to recoup some costs shouldered by taxpayers.

“These estimates of potential exposures do not provide a useful framework for evaluating the potential cost of these programs,” Williams said. “This estimate includes programs at their hypothetical maximum size, and it was never likely that the programs would be maxed out at the same time.”

Barofsky’s estimates include $2.3 trillion in programs offered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., $7.4 trillion in TARP and other aid from the Treasury and $7.2 trillion in federal money for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, credit unions, Veterans Affairs and other federal programs.

Treasury’s Comment

Williams said the programs include escalating fee structures designed to make them “increasingly unattractive as financial markets normalize.” Dependence on these federal programs has begun to decline, as shown by $70 billion in TARP capital investments that has already been repaid, Williams said.

Barofsky offered criticism in a separate quarterly report of Treasury’s implementation of TARP, saying the department has “repeatedly failed to adopt recommendations” needed to provide transparency and fulfill the administration’s goal to implement TARP “with the highest degree of accountability.”

As a result, taxpayers don’t know how TARP recipients are using the money or the value of the investments, he said in the report.

‘Falling Short’

“This administration promised an ‘unprecedented level’ of accountability and oversight, but as this report reveals, they are falling far short of that promise,” Representative Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the oversight committee, said in a statement. “The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”

The Treasury has spent $441 billion of TARP funds so far and has allocated $202.1 billion more for other spending, according to Barofsky. In the nine months since Congress authorized TARP, Treasury has created 12 programs involving funds that may reach almost $3 trillion, he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithnershould press banks for more information on how they use the more than $200 billion the government has pumped into U.S. financial institutions, Barofsky said in a separate report.

The inspector general surveyed 360 banks that have received TARP capital, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. The responses, which the inspector general said it didn’t verify independently, showed that 83 percent of banks used TARP money for lending, while 43 percent used funds to add to their capital cushion and 31 percent made new investments.

Barofsky said the TARP inspector general’s office has 35 ongoing criminal and civil investigations that include suspected accounting, securities and mortgage fraud; insider trading; and tax investigations related to the abuse of TARP programs.

We were sold the stimulus (more commonly known to people who actually knew what was going on as ‘porkulus,’ and more accurately known as the Generational Theft Act) as a $787 billion package. But it was actually no such thing. The media kept talking about billions; but the actual figure was $3.27 TRILLION. That’s right. $3.27 trillion. We were lied to. Costs that were clearly part of the legislation weren’t disclosed to us, and now on top of getting far less than what was advertised, we are paying far more for the privilege than was advertised.

Now we find out that Obama and his gang of thieves has done much the same with TARP. Somehow, while we weren’t looking, “TARP evolved into a program of unprecedented scope, scale and complexity.” And by the same people who promised us an “‘unprecedented level’ of accountability and oversight.” And lo and behold, TARP has exploded under all the darkness into a mushroom cloud of government obligations that dwarf anything imaginable.

And all that’s coming out of the Obama administration is some stumbling excuse from the Treasury Department’s spin doctor that it really isn’t as bad as the inspector general scrutinizing TARP says it is.

We face a future damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma: the only reason interest rates aren’t shooting skyward is because the market is in such a doldrum. But the moment recovery begins to rear its head in Barack Obama’s game of economic Whack-a-Mole (where he whacks down small businesses and private-sector employment), hyperinflation due to our massive indebtedness will likely attack us. The prospect of a jobless recovery, followed by Zimbabwe-levels of inflation looms very large in our future.

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

Obama said:

“For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs,” Obama said at a speech in Fairfax, Virginia. on Jan. 8

At the time Obama was fearmongering audiences in Fairfax, the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent. Obama claimed in that speech that the country would face double-digit unemployment without the stimulus package even though the Congressional Budget Office forecast was slightly lower: 9 percent unemployment by 2010.

And the politics of fear worked. Obama – who had promised an “end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics” – passed a stimulus bill which completely shut out Republicans, and rushed it through Congress so quickly no one was even allowed to read it.

Obama promised that his stimulus would “save or create” 3.5 million jobs. Aside from the simple fact that “save or create” is nothing more than a cheap marketing sleight of hand gimmick that neither Bush or Clinton were allowed to get away with, Obama also promised something that is now easy to disprove: his administration assured America “that the economic stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8 percent.”

With the stimulus bill now becoming law, we’re digging even deeper into debt. The headline price tag of $787 billion doesn’t include the extra $348 billion it will take to finance the new debt, or what it will cost when Congress extends the spending programs in the bill, as is likely — as much as $2 trillion more. Add in the billions that are being used to prop up the financial system, and when the dust settles on 2009, with millions of baby boomers retiring and entitlement spending exploding, taxpayers will face a financial nightmare.

Let that sink in for a moment: OBAMA COMPLETELY BLEW IT ON THE ECONOMY. His stimulus has done more to harm the economy than help it by the official government numbers. Just as conservatives predicted all along!!!

The media have done everything they possibly could for Obama. From Newsweek (hardly a conservative source):

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America. […]

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”

Barack Obama – both in terms of liberal ideology shared by the media, and the need to protect a president who represents big government bureaucracy – has been deemed too big to fail by the media establishment.

And thus they have offered him one rhetorical bailout after another from the very get-go.

Realize that this fawning media coverage has occurred during the very time that Obama has implemented one bailout after another that the public despised. For instance:

A new poll shows that a full 67 percent of U.S. voters oppose the Obama administration’s plan to bail out General Motors with nearly $50 billion – and 51 percent of all Americans say they would rather buy a car from Ford because it did not take a government bailout.

In a statement, the White House announced today that the U.S. Treasury will provide approximately $30.1 billion to GM through an expedited chapter 11 proceeding and transition the new GM through its restructuring plan.

How many jobs would the American people have been able to create had they had the $50 billion that Obama threw at GM? More importantly, how many jobs would the American people have been able to create had they had the $3.27 trillion of the porkulus bill?

Sadly, what we’re left with are Barack Obama’s politically ginned-up “saved” jobs.

Pardon my language, but the Obama stimulus bill was crap. It hasn’t produced squat. It was a gigantic $3.27 trillion socialist spending giveaway that has rightly been called “the Generational Theft Act of 2009.”

But now there’s an even BIGGER bogus ‘Bama baloney claim that has been utterly refuted by actual reality. In a March 7 speech in Columbus, Ohio, Obama said the following:

Now there were those — there were those who argued that our recovery plan was unwise and unnecessary. They opposed the very notion that government has a role in ending the cycle of job loss at the heart of this recession. There are those who believe that all we can do is repeat the very same policies that led us here in the first place. […]

So for those who still doubt the wisdom of our recovery plan, I ask them to talk to the teachers who are still able to teach our children because we passed this plan. I ask them to talk to the nurses who are still able to care for our sick, and the firefighters and first responders who will still be able to keep our communities safe. I ask them to come to Ohio and meet the 25 men and women who will soon be protecting the streets of Columbus because we passed this plan. (Applause.) I look at these young men and women, I look into their eyes and I see their badges today and I know we did the right thing.

These jobs and the jobs of so many other police officers and teachers and firefighters all across Ohio will now be saved because of this recovery plan-– a plan that will also create jobs in every corner of this state. Last week, we announced that Ohio would receive $128 million that will put people to work renovating and rebuilding affordable housing. (Applause.) On Tuesday — on Tuesday I announced that we’d be sending another $935 million to Ohio that will create jobs rebuilding our roads, our bridges, and our highways. (Applause.) And yesterday, Vice President Biden announced $180 million for this state that will go towards expanding mass transit and buying fuel-efficient buses -– money that will be putting people to work, getting people to work. (Applause.)

Altogether, this recovery plan will save and create over three and a half million American jobs over the next two years.

Well, what has happened since the applause lines? What has happened since the Teleprompter of the United States was packed up and hauled away?

The AP article covering the event noted that Obama “suggested that critics talk to 25 police recruits in Ohio’s capital city who owe their jobs to stimulus spending and ‘talk to the teachers who are still able to teach our children because we passed this plan.’” It also described how “Obama touted the 114th police recruit class as proof that the stimulus plan, which drew scant Republican support in Congress, is paying dividends.”

That article also presented the Republican prediction that the stimulus would be a failure, and why it would be a failure. The very last sentence in the article says:

Breann Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Rep. Pat Tiberi, one of eight Ohio Republicans who voted against the stimulus, noted that the money that saved the recruits’ jobs will run out next year. [Columbus Mayor] Coleman hasn’t said how he’ll pay the officers’ salaries after that.

Nearly 300 Columbus police officers – 17 percent of the force – will be laid off next year if voters don’t approve an income-tax increase on Aug. 4, Columbus Police Chief Walter Distelzweig said this morning.

“If we receive additional revenue, these cuts would not be made,” Distelzweig said.

The 2010 budget plan he unveiled this morning is based on revenue projections without the proposed tax increase. The Police Division would shrink by 324 officers, with 297 layoffs and 27 retirements, according to the chief.

If the cuts happen, the division would have fewer officers than in any year since 1993. Columbus had 91,000 fewer residents then.

Potential layoffs would affect the 25 recruits whose class was saved by federal stimulus money this year. Officers hired during the past four years likely would lose their jobs, Distelzweig said.

And I’d be willing to bet the jobs of all the firefighters and nurses and teachers Obama talked all that smack about are in the same boat.

In other words, Obama created 25 jobs and saved about 300 others – until they were told to expect their pink slips less than 3 months later. And it only cost $3.27 trillion dollars. There’s your tax dollars at work.

How is it that jobs that have already been “saved” by Obama’s gargantuan stimulus plan now have to be “saved” again by a massive state tax increase?